The great strides made by Palestine Potash, Limited, which is developing the Dead Sea concession, were made known at the second general meeting of the company held here recently, by Moses Novomejsky, Jewish engineer, who is managing director of the company.
The company has been operating for less than two years, having secured the concession from Great Britain in 1929. Since 1921, Mr. Novomejsky had been seeking to secure a concession for extracting minerals from the Dead Sea and had been unable to consummate his plans until he received the moral and financial support of a small group of American Zionists comprised of Israel B. Brodie, Robert Szold, Abraham Tulin and others who more recently have undertaken to foster other economic undertakings in Palestine through the American Economic Committee for Palestine.
In 1925, he secured $50,000 from this group to enable him to proceed with his plans and four years later secured about $500,000 toward the capitalization of his company.
Mr. Novomejsky’s report goes into details concerning the achievements of the company in its various fields of endeavor and declares as follows:
“In the report submitted to the First Annual General Meeting on the 21st of April, 1931, which dealt with the first year’s activities of the Company, reference was made to the decision of the Board to increase the evaporation plant so as to create a unit capable of producing up to the limits of the present means of transportation from the Dead Sea to one of the Palestine ports, Jaffa or Haifa. New capital to the amount of £39,000 in the form of notes was subscribed by the present shareholders and the proposed increase of plant carried out.
EVAPORATION AREA
“The total area covered with sea water was thus increased from 150 acres to nearly 500 acres. The total length of the dykes erected amounted to 9.5 miles, and the length of the canals excavated to over 3 miles. Pumping operations and filling of tanks with sea brine began early in March and proceeded uninterruptedly up to the middle of November. The quantities of Carnallite (crude Potash Salts) produced in the period under review were up to the Company’s expectations. A new and improved mechanical method of harvesting was introduced. While the few thousand tons of Carnallite produced in the year 1930 were harvested exclusively by hand, over 13,000 tons were harvested this year by the new mechanical method. Efforts to re-
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
